I could not become superuser

[Bill Moran]

Jerry McAllister <jerrymc at clunix.cl.msu.edu> wrote:
> > 
> > Hello
> > 
> > I installed FreeBSD6.0. and it was running well by today . 
> > My FreeBSD server gave a problem about user login.
> > I could not become superuser.
> > my user that has superuser. When I login the server this user 
> > the screen gives things as below
> > user>su 
> > not running setuid
> > 
> > what shell I do ?
> 
> I think you are saying that you tried to 'su' from a non root user login.
> Is that true?
> If so, the thing to check is if that user is in the 'wheel' group.
> Look in the file  /etc/group  and make sure that user is added
> to the wheel group.

Actually, I believe su is more helpful if that's the case, giving an
error such as "you are not in the correct group ..."

The "not running setuid" makes me wonder.  Have you changed permissions
on any files on that machine.  the su program will need setuid permissions
and be owned by root to work properly.  On my 5.4 machine, it looks like
this:

ls -l /usr/bin/su
-r-sr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  14292 May 27 12:24 /usr/bin/su

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com